


Encounter

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Banter, F/M, First Person, Lestat POV, very mild smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-05
Updated: 2008-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-02 01:13:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17254841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: An encounter between Lestat and Bianca.





	Encounter

I found Bianca lounging on her couch, reading some thin volume of paperback poetry. Her blonde hair was free of its usual interweaving of pearls, and she wore an overly loose pink tank-top, one strap of which fell somewhat off her shoulder. Her feet were bare, her shoes having been abandoned on the floor near where she lay. It seemed that she was merely a mortal woman relaxing, in spite of the cold whiteness of her skin. Indeed, her position was so perfectly, so exquisitely nonchalant that I couldn't help but think that she had heard me coming, and taken a moment to arrange herself for my benefit. 

"Have we really become so familiar that you no longer bother with knocking?" Bianca asked. She put down her book and smiled, but she didn't sit up. "I suppose I should have expected it. It's the same in all mythology about our kind, you know. If one allows the prince of vampires into her home once, she can expect to have a prodigiously hard time getting rid of him thereafter."

"The mythology of our kind also has us transforming into bats at whim." I sat down across from her, watching her, and knowing that she knew I watched. I didn't touch her just yet.

"I think you'd make rather a handsome bat." 

This I laughed at. "And I suppose you've seen a handsome bat? Tell me, darling, what would such a creature look like?"

She sat up, smoothing her hair away from her face. 

"Imagine for a moment a sleek brown creature poised in flight, his wings made almost transparent by the light of the moon. Red eyes, perfectly white teeth, only the most artful wrinkles around his nose. I suppose that is what a handsome bat would look like."

"And that's what I would look like as a bat?"

Bianca paused here. She looked thoughtful, so perfectly thoughtful.

"No. I could never imagine you as a bat, to be honest. I only said it to make you smile. Come here."

I did. I sat down besides her, and ran my hand over her shoulder. I pushed the strap of her shirt down off her shoulder. I wanted to see all of her, even if doing so meant that I would be aware once more of how little I could truly know her. 

Bianca turned against me, placing a hand on each of my arm. She looked at me. She had dropped the façade of the 20th century mortal woman, if she had ever really held it in the first place. No, she was of another time, as if she had been perfectly fashioned by the brushstrokes of her era. A millennium could pass, and she would still be the same – a renaissance courtesan, a face straight out of a Botticelli painting. 

"You wanted me to come tonight," I whispered.

"Yes, now take off your jacket."

I did. I was still, as she unbuttoned my shirt, and pushed it off of me. Intoxicating, the coldness of her hands. Her shirt hung down around her waist, a bit awkwardly perhaps. She stepped out of it and the lace skirt that she wore. Her undergarments too were lace, and pink like so much of her clothing. I undid her bra. I wrapped her in my arms so that I cold feel her breasts pressing against me. Her hands had found the zipper of my pants, but I brushed them away. I pushed her hair away from her neck, let my face rest for moment against her cool skin. 

"Do it," she whispered.

I stepped back. She watched me so calmly, too calmly really. It was only in moments like this, moments of perfect stillness, that she reminded me in a way of Armand. Unnerving, the occasional blankness in her eyes, the way that she could seem more like art than woman. 

I forced myself to look away from her face. I put my hands on her waist, sliding her panties down off of her, so I could see her sex beneath it. Pointless, really, this ritual of undressing her, but I couldn't help but love it. Besides, she smiled now, she seemed alive again.

I pulled her to me quickly, before I could get distracted again by the sight of her, before her face could change. I sunk my fangs into her neck. She shivered against me, but this mortal sensation of skin against skin had been rendered inconsequential by the taste of her blood. 

I saw what I always saw when I drank from her – laughter, and poison, a shimmering collage of beauty and death. There was despair too, beyond the veil of images that she allowed me to see. The idea of pushing deeper into her mind then she allowed me was too much like rape, but that isn't really what stopped me. No, it was the thought of her eyes in stillness, the thought that perhaps the despair was an illusion, and there was nothing to her beyond what she chose to show me. 

I stopped drinking. I waited for the moment when she would pierce me, and it came soon enough. 

And then, all too quickly, it was over. 

Bianca picked up her discarded clothing, clutching it against her naked chest, as if in some parody of modesty. 

"You're beautiful," she said. 

It was always the same. She told me that I was beautiful, never anything else. Then again, I could not say that I loved her, not really. If I did, it was the way that one loved a statue, or a shock of flowers in the dead of winter. I adored her, but there was little more to it than that.


End file.
